(107) Mirror and Memory

 

 

– When the mirror becomes confused with memory... or memory becomes confused with the mirror... it is not a mere technical accident. It touches a point where two very different operations... and yet secretly related ones... brush against each other.

 

– This is where the slip becomes fruitful...

What does it reveal?

– It reveals that memory and mirror share a common structure...

– That of reflection!

– Yes... but this reflection is not duplication.

– What is it, then?

– It is always a process of shaping.

– One might say, then, that the mirror is a memory without depth...

– ...or that memory is a mirror... with time. And between the two there would be an oscillation.

– The mirror seems external, memory internal. Yet neither one nor the other is purely outside or purely inside.

– The mirror is readable only through memory. And memory presents itself only in the form of images...

– Meaning?

– Meaning reflections. If we push a little further, we arrive at a more troubling experience.

– Which one?

– In the mirror, we see ourselves as another.

– And in memory?

– In memory, we find ourselves again as another.

– A little like us...

– In both cases, a distance is introduced into the very heart of identity. One is never immediately oneself. One always passes through a form, visible or remembered, in order to reach oneself.

– That is no doubt why the slip holds true: it reveals a structural proximity.

– You know, what we call “memory” and “mirror” are not two foreign realities.

– What are they, then?

– They are two modalities of the same phenomenon: the manner in which something presents itself to itself by becoming doubled.

– And if we return to what you were telling me earlier... that “something” which happens to us...

– One might say this: whatever appears is always already caught between memory and mirror. It presents itself as an image—the mirror—but that image has meaning only because it resonates with what has already been—the memory.

– Thus seeing, remembering, recognizing... all of that would belong to the same scene.

– A scene in which nothing is ever given directly, but always through a reflection which, at the very moment it reveals, also transforms.